1. Technical Field
This invention relates to web-enabled transactions, and more particularly to an automated system for document research, aggregation, and report generation.
2. Background Information
Existing publishing systems provide mechanisms for searching and navigating through a library of documents. Such systems, however, are limited in their ability enable users to repurpose content from source documents into their own project reports. For example, business consulting firms typically spend considerable staff time assembling relevant findings from various sources into a report that is specifically tailored to a particular client's project. This task often requires considerable human operator time to: identify and assemble relevant content from a range of source material types; convert each to a common file format; maintain a record of the source documents, including author, publisher, publication dates, terms of use, etc.; provide output of aggregated content in desired output file formats; facilitate peer review and provide reference to the original sources; and retain selection criteria and other records in order to regenerate the report at a later date based on updated source documents.
Moreover, conventional approaches used to automate portions of this process have faltered in their attempts to convert the source material from their various native formats into a common format to facilitate manipulation. These approaches have either been unable to convert some formats (e.g., from image formats into text), or have done so in a manner that has been prone to errors including loss of original content and/or loss of original formatting including pagination, line numbering, and visual integrity errors, etc. Moreover, because such errors are generated early in the process, on the source material, they tend to be propagated to all users of that material, and may also be compounded during subsequent reformatting into the desired output format.
Moreover, while publishers routinely provide general advice to their customers via a finite range of publications, they may also wish to provide advice that is specific to the needs of a particular customer via a consulting project. However, this tends to create administrative overhead that makes such projects prohibitive for smaller ad-hoc queries. The lack of a mechanism to meet this customer need means that publishers have a valuable pool of expertise and knowledge, but limited options in how to employ it to the benefit of their readers.
Thus, a need exists for a system and method that addresses the foregoing limitations.